Shipping companies typically charge customers for their services based on package size (i.e., volumetric weight) and/or weight (i.e., dead weight). When printing a shipping label for a package to be shipped, a customer enters both the size and weight of the package into a software application that bills the customer based on the information. Typically, customers get this information by hand-measuring package's dimensions (e.g., with a tape measure) and may weigh the package on a scale. In some cases, customers simply guess the weight of the package. Both guessing of the weight and hand-measurement of dimensions are prone to error, particularly when packages have irregular shape. When the shipping company determines, at a later time, that the package is larger and/or heavier than reported by the customer, an additional bill may be issued to the customer. Additional bills may reduce customer satisfaction, and, if the shipping customer is a retail company who has already passed along the shipping cost to an end customer, decrease the customer's earnings.
Furthermore, shipping companies may also collect the package's origin, destination, and linear dimensions from a customer to determine the correct charges for shipping a package. Manual entry of this information by a customer or the shipping company is also error prone.
As such, there is a commercial need for systems that accurately collect a package's size, weight, linear dimensions, origin, and destination and for integration with billing systems to reduce errors in transcribing that data.